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from the heat-death-of-the-universe-to-break,-or-maybe-five-years dept.
One year ago the IETF published TLS 1.3 in RFC 8446. Here is what is different from previous versions.
TLS 1.3 is the seventh iteration of the SSL/TLS protocol, having been preceded by SSL 1.0, SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, and TLS 1.2.
TLS 1.2 has been serving the internet faithfully for a decade now, yet nearly 25% of the Alexa Top 100,000 still doesn't support it. That's problematic, because making the jump from TLS 1.2 to to TLS 1.3 is already a fairly large change. Upgrading from even older protocols will require even more configuration.
Now, that's not to imply upgrading is prohibitively difficult, it's more to illustrate that one of the biggest challenges that's going to face TLS 1.3, at least for the next year or so, is the rate of adoption.
As of the end of last year, just over 17% of the Alexa Top 100,000 supported TLS 1.3.
Here are the primary differences in TLS 1.3 and prior versions:
- Eliminates support for outmoded algorithms and ciphers
- Eliminates RSA key exchange, mandates Perfect Forward Secrecy
- Reduces the number of negotiations in the handshake
- Reduces the number of algorithms in a cipher suite to 2
- Eliminates block mode ciphers and mandates AEAD bulk encryption
- Uses HKDF cryptographic extraction and key derivation
- Offers 1-RTT mode and Zero Round Trip Resumption
- Signs the entire handshake, an improvement of TLS 1.2
- Supports additional elliptic curves
In short, TLS 1.3 is faster to establish, faster to reestablish, streamlined throughout, and more secure than previous versions of SSL and TLS.
Most popular browser clients already support TLS 1.3. Server library versions supporting TLS 1.3 include
- OpenSSL 1.1.1
- GnuTLS 3.5.x
- Google's Boring SSL (current)
- Facebook's Fizz (current)
What's in your server?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by driverless on Wednesday July 17 2019, @04:34AM
That's the important thing. And it was mostly driven by Google, as a means of making Google's content delivery more efficient. The security red herring was just an excuse to replace existing algorithms with all the latest hipster stuff, but most of the motivation behind 1.3 was to make things easier for organisations like Google to push content out to clients, even when it negatively impacted security (0RTT is just a giant foot-shoot waiting to happen). Properly-implemented TLS 1.2 is no more or less secure than properly-implemented 1.3. And that's the rub, you don't get better security by throwing everything away and starting again, you get it by fixing your existing code. Since TLS 1.3 is starting again from a mostly new codebase, there's going to be lots and lots of vulns discovered that were bred out of TLS 1.2 implementations over the years. Keep an eye on anything doing 0RTT in particular, but there's lots more areas for vulnerabilities.